This Locarno Golden Leopard winner with some fascinating use of sound and camera is boldly conceived if occasionally uneven, shot clandestinely in Tehran as a driver heavily reliant on GPS finds existential purpose in healing people with drugs.

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When I was watching Critical Zone, I felt a pinch of familiarity but couldn’t quite pin it down.  It was only days later that I found myself tracing back to Paul Schrader’s terrific Light Sleeper (1992), a criminally underrated work about a drug dealer who wanders the city streets in a chauffeured car during sleepless nights. 

In Critical Zone, this nocturnal activity occurs in the underbelly of Tehran, where a hidden community of drug addicts seek their doses of hashish from Amir, who prides himself as being not a dealer but a healer. 

A winner of the Locarno Golden Leopard, writer-director Ali Ahmadzade has fashioned one of the more unorthodox films to have recently come out of Iran. 

Shot clandestinely, Critical Zone is not so much about the spaces where the chronic problems of society exist, but a kind of barometer as to how much compassion and empathy is (still) left in the metaphorical fuel tank. 

Amir pushes himself every night to perform the role of saviour to the physically and mentally condemned, but even he is running on empty, at risk of burnout and being uncovered by the authorities. 

“I curse whoever caused this.”

His dog gives him comfort, and so does his vehicle’s GPS (with a somewhat sultry voice) which he completely relies on to move from one undisclosed location to the next. 

While sometimes uneven in tone, and featuring a rather cliché original score that more often than not feels too conspicuous in telling the audience how to feel, Critical Zone, to its credit, does present some fascinating uses of the camera and sound. 

In certain scenes, the camera (attached to the dashboard) swirls around constantly, mimicking a sense of ‘car-sickness’ that contributes to its hyper-realist intensity.  It is as anti-Kiarostami as it gets. 

Some of the film’s dialogue is also mixed in a more echoey, semi-conscious way, expressing the daze of a drug-fuelled odyssey that seems endless… until the final destination is reached. 

Grade: B

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Trailer: